All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [53]
Florin stared down at her, swallowed, and then said hurriedly, in the two breaths left to him, "You shall be remembered with honor, Margrueth!"
As he'd been bid, he brought his blade down in a clean thrust, right through the old sorceress, and into Nelyssa beneath, where her armor was all riven away down her front. Margrueth jerked once under his steel, and blue-white light, like many tiny lightnings, crackled and danced around the joined lips of the two women.
Florin drew his blade out carefully. For a moment, the same radiance clung to its suddenly shining length. It looked as bright and sharp as it was when new, the scrapes and nicks of battle gone from it.
Yet more wondrous far was what befell where it had been. Margrueth's body was twisting and contracting into a thing of curling smoke, to the accompaniment of one last, dry chuckle.
That sound faded, and Nelyssa's revealed body stirred, color returned to her face, and a light came into her dark eyes. She slowly sat up.
" Florin?" she asked softly as the Harpers and farmers around cried out in wonder, gasped, or wept, "Have I slept? Is the day won-or lost?"
And Florin Falconhand cast aside his blade and knelt to take her in his arms. "Won for some, Captain… won for Mistledale. And yet lost for others, lost forever. Margrueth traded her life for yours."
The captain of the Riders turned pale. "No!"
"Aye, Nelyssa," Florin said gently, "you must know this, and hear the truth. She chose freely, and worked a magic I did not know, binding me under oath. Mine was the blade that took her life, and gave it to you. She was at the end of her life, drained by this battle… and brought you back to us."
The paladin of Chauntea flung her arms around him and wept.
"Hmmph," Torm said to Rathan as they trudged across the field, taking up the best weapons and tossing them on a farmer's sledge to bear back to Ashabenford, "women never do that to me. My arms await-see? Here they are, two of them, and fairly well matched to each other, too-and do ladies sob their sorrows away into my breast? No! Is it the cut of his chin, d'you think? The wave in his hair? His strong, manly bearing? Those gleaming teeth?"
"All of those," his friend agreed. "Now give me a hand with this halberd-three dead ones draped over it, look ye; three-and take comfort in the fact that ye've probably been in almost as many strange beds as he has… an' that ye're better far at stealing things."
"Umm," Torm agreed, looking again at the woman in Florin 's arms. His eyes fell to the dark, sticky puddle of blood they shared, and he swallowed. So much blood…
"When we get back to the Six Shields," he told Rathan fiercely, "I'm going to get very drunk!"
"Oh? Don't forget that ye lost the bet with Sylune! We won the battle, so ye have to wear the scanties ye were putting on her, an' go sit in the window!"
"But she's… dead. You won't hold me to-"
"Oh, but I will," Rathan said softly. "In memory of her, ye will sit in that window this night, if I have to break thy limbs to get the fripperies onto ye."
Torm tore a gorget free of a Zhentilar who'd not be needing it anymore, and flung it with a clatter onto the sledge. "I'm going to get very very drunk!" he said fiercely, "first."
"Hmm," Rathan said, lifting a body into the air with one hand to pluck daggers free with the other, "that'll make the dressing an amusing affair. May I watch?"
"He'll be too drunk to stop anyone from watching," one buzzard commented to the other, shifting a little on a low, bare branch as a nearby farmer gave them a dirty look, bent to pick up a fallen bow, and then shrugged and turned away, knowing he couldn't hit the tree, let alone two watchful carrion birds.
"Faerun certainly affords more entertainment than Shadowhome," Bralatar said, remembering the battle as he looked out over the ravaged field.
"And because the peril to and consequences for us are the less, one can really enjoy it," Lorgyn